James Luna

James Luna

Visiting & Adjunct Faculty

Lecturer & Holt Visiting Artist

Art Practice

About

Internationally renowned performance and installation artist James Luna (Puyukitchum/Luiseno) resides on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in North County San Diego, California. With over 40 years of exhibition and performance experience Luna has given voice to Native American cultural issues, pursued innovative and versatile media within his disciplines, and charted waters for other artists to follow. His powerful works transform gallery spaces into battlefields, where the audience is confronted with the nature of cultural identity, the tensions generated by cultural isolation, and the dangers of cultural misinterpretations, all from an Indigenous perspective.

Since 1975, he has had over 41 solo exhibitions, participated in 89 group exhibitions and has performed at 129 venues that include the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, NM and the Sacred Grounds Festival, London, UK.

His performances have been sponsored by a range of presenters, including Nippon International Performance Festival, Tokyo, Japan; SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM), Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM, Toronto Free Gallery with Red Sky Performance and imagineNATIVE (Toronto), TRIBE INC/Neutral Ground, (Saskatoon), Paved Arts, (Regina), and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.

He has received several major awards and grants including the Painters & Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Distinguished Artist Award and the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Native American Fine Art from Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in 2007, US/Japan Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship, from the Japan-US Friendship Commission, the Performing Arts/Emerging Fields production grant from Creative Capital, Andrea Frank Foundation grant. In 2017 Luna received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts and The Holt Visiting Artist grant at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

In addition, Luna has received media arts grants from the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium for the production of Bringing It All Back Home in 1995 and a Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video Grant of for the production of The History of the Luiseno People-Christmas 1990.

Most notably, in 2005, he was selected as the first Sponsored Artist of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale’s 51st International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy. In 2012 James was awarded Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM.